“Water floats memories. Think of
any phase in your experience and soon you will find some stream twisting
through your thoughts. . . . Scott McMillin revives them for me in The Meaning of Rivers. His effort is
both ambitious and disarmingly simple. He wants, as his title suggests, to set
us thinking not about the surface of rivers, whether smooth and shiny or turbid
and rough, but rather about their philosophical significance. ‘What do rivers
mean?’ he insists on asking us at the outset, and he will not let us off easy.
We cannot reply that rivers are about the endless flow of experience, or that
they mirror the fluid uncertainty of our souls—such clichés will not do. For
one thing, he conceives of rivers in their intransigent thereness, their actuality. If rivers are to mean something, it
will not be because we can forget actual flows of water, with the debris they
carry and the work they do. It is because we remember their material reality
that we will earn the right to ask the deeper questions he wants us to
consider.”—Wayne Franklin, from the foreword

“Rivers not only wind their way
across the American continent, but course through American literature and art.
T. S. McMillin offers a learned and lively primer for our reading of river literature
and of rivers themselves—and in the process a primer for understanding how the
human mind derives meaning from all of nature.”—Scott Slovic, author, Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat,
and Ecocritical Responsibility

In the continental United States,
rivers serve to connect state to state, interior with exterior, the past to the
present, but they also divide places and peoples from one another. These
connections and divisions have given rise to a diverse body of literature that
explores American nature, ranging from travel accounts of seventeenth-century
Puritan colonists to magazine articles by twenty-first-century enthusiasts of
extreme sports. Using pivotal American writings to determine both what
literature can tell us about rivers and, conversely, how rivers help us think
about the nature of literature, The
Meaning of Rivers introduces readers to the rich world of flowing water and
some of the different ways in which American writers have used rivers to
understand the world through which these waters flow.

Embracing
a hybrid, essayistic form—part literary theory, part cultural history, and part
fieldwork—The Meaning of Rivers
connects the humanities to other disciplines and scholarly work to the land.
Whether developing a theory of palindromes or reading works of American
literature as varied as Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers and James
Dickey’s Deliverance, McMillin urges readers toward a
transcendental retracing of their own interpretive encounters.

The
nature of texts and the nature of “nature” require diverse and versatile
interpretation; interpretation requires not only depth and concentration but
also imaginative thinking, broad-mindedness, and engaged connection-making. By
taking us upstream as well as down, McMillin draws attention to the potential
of rivers for improving our sense of place and time.